The case for Trump

Republican presidential nominee and former US President Donald Trump touches the protective glass during a campaign rally
Republican presidential nominee and former US President Donald Trump touches the protective glass during a campaign rally - Eloisa Lopez/Reuters

I asked an American friend what he thought of Trump and he replied with a joke about Franco. An English tourist in 1950s Spain asks a waiter his opinion of the local dictator. The waiter says, “I’ll tell you, but it’s not safe here.” So the Englishman follows him through the kitchen, into a cab, to the harbour where they take a boat to a distant island. There, the waiter checks they’re alone and whispers: “He’s not all bad.”

If Trump wins re-election, it’s because he’s actually quite good. It’s hard to tell through the fog of hostile coverage and his wild tongue (“they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs…”), and he’s obviously of dubious character. But millions have made their peace with this man without feeling it necessary to like him. They’re not rednecks or collectively insane. They are rational human beings who know Trump better now than they did in 2016 – and think he did a better job in office than the Democrats.

Joe Biden has been an okay president. The US added around 15 million jobs on his watch, violent crime fell, salaries rose. The problem is that though inflation has abated, the initial spike hurt – causing grocery prices to soar by about 20 per cent (the cost of a carton of eggs almost doubled). Doubts about America’s future were embodied in Biden’s physical decline. Swapping Biden for Kamala Harris – without a primary vote cast – affirmed elite arrogance. Look at Harris as the American Keir Starmer: vapid, policy-lite, competitive only because so many loathe the opposition.

Trump, she says, is incompetent. Yet from 2017-2021 there was no war. He signed massive tax cuts and deregulation, triggering the best stock market returns under a Republican since the 1920s. Unemployment fell to its lowest since 1969. Wages increased by 15 per cent. America became a net natural gas exporter for the first time since 1957.

You might have heard all this before. What follows is a surprise.

Trump was the first president to audit the Pentagon. He signed bills to guarantee spaces in airports for breastfeeding, clean the ocean, make it easier to import cheaper pharmaceuticals from Canada and give paid parental leave to all federal workers. He handed out HIV prevention drugs, appointed five openly gay ambassadors and tasked one diplomat with promoting the global decriminalisation of homosexuality. He pushed for domestic justice reform, trimming sentences for the unduly imprisoned – over 90 per cent of whom were black. If men of colour are planning to vote for Trump, it might be because he drove their unemployment and poverty rates to new lows.

He rode the tail-end of Obama’s boom, no doubt, and some of these achievements were bi-partisan efforts. But the point stands that the sky did not fall in under Trump. On the contrary, his key policies proved so effective that Biden continued them.

Think of Trump as the product of his times (or, as Marx put it, an epiphenomenon). At the end of the Cold War, Democrats and Republicans embraced globalism, arguing that cooperation and free trade – policed by the US military – would make all of us richer. Dissidents on Left and Right said it wouldn’t work. The ruthless businessman Donald J Trump warned that life is a contest – and if you don’t fight, you lose.

Globalism in practice meant jobs going overseas, open borders, dictators enriched and the US bleeding out in never-ending wars. So, Trump ran on a platform of putting America first. Liberals screamed “fascism” – yet since 2016 it’s become glaringly obvious that Trumpism is both accurate in analysis and popular with the working class. Hence the Democrats copied it. Biden has used tariffs on China, reversed the flow of manufacturing jobs, withdrawn from Afghanistan and, after initially going soft on the border, deported over two million people.

Trump’s Remain in Mexico refugee policy is also similar to those explored by Britain and Italy, and if Trump wins, he’ll inherit a Europe that is much closer to him politically than it was eight years ago. The exception is on the Ukraine war, where his rhetoric suggests he’ll push for a ceasefire. But we can’t be certain what he’ll do. The reason why Trump is endorsed by both pro-Israelis and Arab-Americans is because he deliberately projects ambiguity, keeping enemies and friends on their toes. At the time, Nato members resented being told they had to spend more on defence; now we can see it was good for us, forcing Europe to remilitarise rather than rely on America’s generosity.

The word that sums up Trump is “realism”. It’s never nice; by definition, it can’t be. Could we have had the populist revolution without Trump? Probably not, because the task required someone with the arrogance and, crucially, the self-financing to point out the West was going wrong and to endure the establishment’s wrath. He doesn’t care what other people think.

The downside is that such a person is often a monster. Trump is accused of a list of crimes from rape to attempting to steal an election, and though some charges will be false, the combined weight of them grinds America down. I’ve heard voters who hate Trump joke that they’re praying he wins, because if he doesn’t, he’ll start a riot. The Democrats, running against a radical demagogue, have cannily portrayed themselves as the real conservatives – a vote to restore the consensus that existed pre-Trump, which was supposedly civil and kind.

But it’s a myth. Everything Trump is accused of, other administrations have done: in June, Hunter Biden became the first son of an incumbent to be criminally convicted. And for several of the “extreme” Trump positions we can identify a liberal polar opposite, from defunding the cops to pushing transgender ideology. Many Democrats favour legalisation of abortion everywhere, up to birth; Trump prefers the states to decide, with no national ban. He is the moderate on this issue.

Pope Francis – a political socialist – has observed that while the Right’s position on refugees is anti-human, so is the Left’s on abortion or gender. Vote for the lesser evil, said the pontiff, and declined to state who that was. I infer that Democrats and Republicans are as bad as each other, just in different ways.

To lay out a case for Trump is to make oneself a hostage to fortune. He could undermine every argument here made with a single crazy word or action. But if he is a risk, so is staying the course. The West is in material and spiritual decline, measured in collapsing birth-rates and mental anguish (the US suicide rate for 2022 was the highest since 1941). The people who have overseen this crisis – sensible and centrist though they purport to be – are telling a population that can whiff its own mortality, “you’re doing better than you think” and “the dangerous thing is to change.”

This even as Iran inches towards getting nuclear weapons, and Putin runs a missile test for a massive strike against the West. People call Trump an arsonist, but the house is already on fire.

I offer no endorsement – what’s the point in a Brit giving one of those? – rather an argument that voting for Trump can be perfectly reasonable, far from deplorable. British readers might be horrified by any sympathy for a candidate who, allegedly, doesn’t care about the outside world. But isn’t the point of representative democracy for the elected to put their constituents first, to secure the borders, create jobs, bring home the troops?

In substance if not style, Britain could do with its own Donald Trump.